【正文】 s futurologist, Ian Pearson, these are among the developments scheduled for the first few decades of the new millennium (a period of 1,000 years), when superputers will dramatically accelerate progress in all areas of life. 73) Pearson has pieced together the work of hundreds of researchers around the world to produce a unique millennium technology calendar that gives the latest dates when we can expect hundreds of key breakthroughs and discoveries to take place. Some of the biggest developments will be in medicine, including an extended life expectancy and dozens of artificial organs ing into use between now and 2040. Pearson also predicts a breakthrough in puterhuman links. By linking directly to our nervous system, puter could pick up what we feel and, hopefully, simulate feeling too so that we can start to develop full sensory environments, rather like the holidays in Tota。 time the Star Trek holodeck will be a reality. Direct links between the brain39。s nervous system and a puter will also create full sensory virtual environments, allowing virtual vacations like those in the film Total Recall. 71) There will be television chat shows hosted by robots, and cars with pollution monitors that will disable them when they offend. 72) Children will play with dolls equipped with personality chips, puters with inbuilt personalities will be regarded as workmates rather than tools, relaxation will be in front of smelltelevision, and digital age will have arrived. According to BT39。s instinct for moral reasoning in action, an instinct that should be encouraged rather than laughed at. Passage 8 In less than 30 years39。 interests against one39。t like this contract? The point is this: without agreement on the rights of people, arguing about the rights of animals is fruitless. 73) It leads the discussion to extremes at the outset。t, because it assumes that there is an agreed account of human rights, which is something the world does not have. On one view of rights, to be sure, it necessarily follows that animals have none. 72) Some philosophers argue that rights exist only within a social contract, as part of an exchange of duties and entitlements. Therefore, animals cannot have rights. The idea of punishing a tiger that kills somebody is absurd。 but it is a frightening trend. 72) This trend began during the Second World War, when several governments came to the conclusion that the specific demands that a government wants to make of its scientific establishment cannot generally be foreseen in detail. It can be predicted, however, that from time to time questions will arise which will require specific scientific answers. It is therefore generally valuable to treat the scientific establishment as a resource or machine to be kept in functional order. 73) This seems mostly effectively done by supporting a certain amount of research not related to immediate goals but of possible consequence in the future. This kind of support, like all government support, requires decisions about the appropriate recipients of funds. Decisions based on utility as opposed to lack of utility are straightforward. But a decision among projects none of which has immediate utility is more difficult. The goal of the supporting agencies is the praisable one of supporting good as opposed to bad science, but a valid determination is difficult to make. Generally, the idea of good science tends to bee confused with the capacity of the field in question to generate an elegant theory. 74) However, the world is so made that elegant systems are in principle unable to deal with some of the world39。 定語從句后置需要重復先行詞。s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite — Cobe — had discovered landmark evidence that the universe did in fact begin with the primeval explosion that has bee known as the Big Bang (the theory that the universe originated in an explosion from a single mass of energy.) 72) The existence of the giant clouds was virtually required for the Big Bang, first put forward in the 1920s, to maintain its reign as the dominant explanation of the cosmos. According to the theory, the universe burst into being as a submicroscopic, unimaginable dense knot of pure energy that flew outward in all directions, emitting radiation as it went, condensing into particles and then into atoms of gas. Over billions of years, the gas was pressed by gravity into galaxies, stars, plants and eventully, even humans. Cobe is designed to see just the biggest structures, but astronomers would like to see much smaller hot spots as well, the seeds of local objects like clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They shouldn39。s definition is the concept that culture is learned. shared, and patterned behavior. (65) Thus, the anthropological concept of culture, like the concept of set in mathematics,is an abstract concept which makes possible immense amounts of concrete research and understanding. Passage 5 They were, by far, the largest and most distant objects that scientists had ever detected: a strip of enormous cosmic clouds some 15 billion lightyears from earth. 71) But even more important, it was the farthest that scientists had been able to look into the past, for what they were seeing were the patterns and structures that existed 15 billion years ago. That was just about the moment that the universe was born. What the researchers found was at once both amazing and expected。 Passage 10 Human beings in all times and places think about their world and wonder at their place in it. Humans are thoughtful and creative, possessed of insatiable curiosity. (61) Furthermore, humans have the ability to modify the environment in which they live, thus subjecting all other life forms to their own peculiar ideas and fancies. Therefore, it is important to study humans in all their richness and diversity in a calm and systematic manner, with the hope that the knowledge resulting from such studies can lead humans to a more harmonious way of li